While a good argument, it's entirely moot. SpaceX is not going to eat the cost of insurance. They'll simply buy the insurance for NASA and add the cost of the insurance (and the costs involved with hiring someone to deal with the insurance) to the cost of the launch. NASA can buy insurance direct or it can use a middleman (SpaceX), in the end, NASA is paying for it either way.

I mean seriously, why is this a surprise? How else are you going to fight a legislated cartel except with lobbyist? They would be fools not to have lobbyists, and quite an army of them, if they're going to go after an industry that's as heavily legislated as taxis.

Any vote from the house, from it's very definition, should have no affect on the 4th amendment, save for a vote on a constitutional amendment. The very idea that a vote on a law by the house would give power or remove power from the 4th is an insult and an attack not on the 4th, but on the constitution its self.

"two years of 'ridiculous spending"
I'm not so sure they failed, depending on what they spent the money on. If they spent it on over paying their board or for boondoggle trips for their board, the people at the top could have come out very well, despite it being unsustainable. If someone wants to pay me 10 million dollars for example, and 2 yeas later I lose my job, I'd hardly call my employment in those two years a failure in regards to my personal fiances.

"High frequency trading is essentially skimming off the top for yourself without having done ANYTHING other than having a faster connection."
It provides market liquidity, that is the service is provides. In an increasingly liquid market the amount of money available to be "skimmed off the top" actually goes down, not up so they're actually making the market more efficient (i.e. making the market take less money from you, not more). This is a well studied problem and isn't as horrible as most people think. The real problem with these HFTs is spike crashes that inadvertently trigger stop loss orders (automatic sell orders) from people who aren't engaging in HFT. Without deliberately initiating such a crash, you can not profit from the crash, and it's quite illegal to manufacture such a crash deliberately.

"what's the chance he's going to be productive those two weeks anyway?"
While there are a lot of people who slack to hell when they quit, there are a lot of people who actually care about their co-workers, even if they don't care about their employer, and will work overtime (unpaid) their last two weeks trying to minimize the impact of them leaving to their co-workers. If you're a program manager you're going to have a much different amount of spin down to pass off your work than if you're an entry level help desk worker.

Is there any evidence (or even suspicion) that either side here used either the patent filing or actual stolen technology to create their product? If not then the laws are clearly broken when we are allowing non-revolutionary ideas to be patented.

Really? Cause I'm making well over 100K with my STEM degree. Maybe it has more to do with you than your degree.... Or you're just an AC that got a liberal arts degree and is bitter, I've got no idea really and don't really care. I'm not sure if I've met a single person with a STEM degree that felt they made a mistake and should have not gotten a degree.